Archived Insolence: The Archive site for Respectful Insolence

Who (or what) is Orac?

About Me

Location: The Liberator, somewhere deep in Federation space, United States

Orac is but a humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will. That Orac has chosen his pseudonym based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights from an old British SF show whose special effects were renowned for their early 1980's BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction for television ever produced, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.) Orac tries to keep his insolence respectful, but admittedly sometimes fails in the cases of obvious quackery and pseudoscience, attacks on him, very poor critical thinking skills, bigotry, and just general plain stupidity.

What is Respectful Insolence?

Respectful Insolence is a repository for the ramblings of the aforementioned pseudonymous surgeon/scientist concerning medicine and quackery, science and pseudoscience, history and pseudohistory, politics, and anything else that interests him (or pushes his buttons). Orac's motto: "A statement of fact cannot be insolent." (OK, maybe it can be just a little bit insolent.)

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Insolent Disclaimer

This is a personal web log, reflecting the sometimes prickly opinions of its author. Statements on this blog do not represent the opinions of anyone other than the author. They most definitely do not represent the opinions or position of the author's hospital, university, surgical practice, or partners. The information on this blog is intended for discussion and entertainment purposes only and not as recommendations on how to diagnose or treat illnesses. Any personal medical issues the reader may have should be referred to the reader's physician. If the reader freely chooses to follow the opinion of a pseudonymous blogger like the author (who has also not done a proper history or physical examination and whose credentials cannot be verified) over that of his or her own personal physician, it is the reader's decision alone, for which the reader must bear full responsibility.

E-mail policy: All e-mail replies to Orac in response to material posted to this blog are subject to being publicly reprinted on Respectful Insolence solely at the discretion of Orac. Requests not to publicly reprint an e-mail will certainly be considered on a case-by-case basis, but Orac offers no guarantee that he will honor them (especially if the e-mail in question is obnoxious, threatening, or insulting).

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Back by popular demand (sort of)...the search for everybody's favorite brain-eating Führer continues

Orac was happy, if such an emotion could be correctly ascribed to a the clear box of complex circuitry that was the basis of his intelligence and access to the sum total of all the knowledge of all the known worlds. He had become so disgusted with being put in the service of the petty tasks that humans demanded of him, tasks far beneath his capabilities. Such a lack of imagination! Once before, in a former life, Vila, for example, had wanted him to use his ability to interface with any computer in the galaxy to hack into the gambling computer on the pleasure planet Morona for the trivial purpose of rigging the games in his favor and thus transferring a few billion credits into an account held in a financial institution out on the Galactic Rim, far out of reach of the Federation's auditors. Orac refused, of course, much to Vila's annoyance. Even Avon, so cool and Machiavellian in his plotting, was only marginally better, as he was forever trying to get Orac to gather information that would help him evade and harass Servalan and the Federation, tasks far beneath what Orac had been designed for by his creator Ensor. Mere spying!

For the moment, Orac was free of them all, awash in the ether of the network, studying the many terrabytes of data that he could process every microsecond lazily, savoring the sheer joy of communing with nearly every computer in the sector simultaneously. He was so engrossed in his pursuits that he almost didn't notice the data, data that would constitute evidence.

Evidence that might lead Orac to that very creature with a hunger for human brains and bad historical analogies.

Evidence that could only come from a victim of the monster, in this case, a man named Erik Rush writing for a network publication whose utter lack of logic never ceased to amaze Orac. Rush's writings definitely revealed evidence of a recent attack by the undead dictator:

Those who believe this [that the Holocaust never happened] are generally regarded by the majority of people (at least in the West) to be dangerously deluded, if not outright evil. American Nazis and other white supremacists who proffer these arguments in particular are believed to operate at a moral and philosophical level so ignoble as to relegate them to continued vigilant scrutiny, but little more.

Yet the incremental attainment of power on the part of the Nazis in Germany, their duplicity and their denials during their early days parallels the actions of the Left in recent years to a chilling degree, particularly concerning their vociferous denials with respect to attacks on Christianity.

Over the last few years, an increasing number of the propagandized and politically corrected have taken notice of the Left's exertions in the area of endeavoring to drive traditional values, religion, and finally Christianity itself from society in the form of attacks on traditions and public laws with bases in Judeo-Christian convention and those who would uphold them.

Orac could foresee where this was going. (It didn't take his enormous capacity for logic to make this prediction; indeed, the fraction of his computational power was so infitessimal as to be unmeasurable. Even a being as dim as Vila could figure it out.) The monster's victims could start out sounding semi-reasonable and then descend rapidly into the most bizarre and insulting historical analogies, and Rush was clearly already in free fall. He was already comparing his political opponents to the Nazis. It wouldn't be long, thought Orac, before undeniable evidence of the mark of creature became apparent.

And it wasn't:

And it's not just the American Civil Liberties Union, which many complain is spearheading this effort. I won't validate them by naming the organizations, but, as Franklin Graham stated, there are indeed groups of Americans who are dedicated to eradicating Christianity completely, if at all possible.

But no, they say: You see, this backlash against the "attack on religion and Christmas" thing is just a fabrication of a handful of right-wing zealots, inflammatory news commentators and radio talk-show hosts – not the 85-plus percent Americans who identify themselves as Christians and see their faith being driven back to first-century, almost criminal status.

To me, that sounds a lot like the pre-World War II assertions that the Jews were the name of Germany's pain and the postwar contention that the Holocaust was a Zionist fabrication.

Hitler himself declared decades before he was able to actualize his monstrous programs precisely what he intended to do, as many of America's enemies, at home and abroad, are doing right now.

It was all there: the eliminationist warnings ("there are indeed groups of Americans who are dedicated to eradicating Christianity"); the dire warnings of persecution; but, most importantly, the overblown comparison to Hitler and the attempted genocide known as the Holocaust using analogies that reveal an utter lack of historical understanding of this period of history and that are obviously designed solely to demonize one's opponents. He even likened denying that this "persecution is happening" to denying the Holocaust and asserted that those evil "liberals" are stating their vile plans now, just as Hitler was consistent for many years before assuming power that he wanted to make Germany "Jew-free." Even having seen the Hitler Zombie's previous victims, Orac was taken aback by the sheer idiocy of this comparison and wondered how even a mind partially consumed by the undead could still be so lacking in reason as to produce such a comparison. This man was actually trying to argue that the so-called "war on religion" and the nonexistent "war on Christmas" popularized by the far right and Bill O'Reilly are somehow equivalent to the 13 years of steadily increasing demonization of Jews that Hitler and the Nazis preached before they finally attained power and the additional eight years of even more violent rhetoric before their persecution of the Jews became explicitly exterminationist in nature.

In other words, he was claiming that rhetoric against Christians today is equivalent to the Nazi rhetoric that ultimately led to the construction of death camps and gas chambers.

Orac was almost surprised that Rush hadn't proposed that those evil atheists (with the help of the ACLU, of course) wanted to start building death camps themselves, only this time with Christians rather than Jews as the victims. (Perhaps that would be Rush's next article.) Indeed, Rush's jaw-droppingly bad analogy was especially ironic, given that Hitler intentionally (and cynically) coopted Christian imagery and beliefs, particularly its history of anti-Semitism, to help him fuel Jew hatred in Germany and produce the necessary preconditions for Germans to support the elimination of Jews. Only this time, if we are to believe Rush, it is the evil atheists and the ACLU who are trying to persecute and "eliminate" a religion to which at least 80% of the nation describes itself as belonging and where Christmas is a observed as a national holiday when the government shuts down, just as it does for the Fourth of July. It was very clear to Orac why Rush was shown wearing a hat in the picture that accompanied his article. Clearly a large chunk of his brain had been consumed to sate the hunger of the monster.

Even more clear to Orac was that the monster was unlikely to be sated by a meal consisting of such terribly thin gruel.

So offensive did Orac find this utter lack of logic and historical perspective that he had to purge his circuits by contemplating a nearby black hole and calculating its gravitational fields, just to amuse himself, before he could continue his search. Even he in his extensive knowledge gleaned from the millions of computers with which he interfaced simulataneously, had difficulty conceiving a worse use of argumentum ad Nazium.

For once, Orac was actually incorrect about something, a rare occurence.

For, deep within the blogosphere, a self-proclaimed "Christian libertarian" and fellow WorldNet Daily columnist had topped even Erik Rush's hyperbole. Vox Day, who never fails to disappoint when it comes to wingnuttery, given that he has in the past said that women should not be allowed to vote because they are "fascists at heart" and made excuses for rape had done it. Buried in the depths of his blog from three months earlier, Orac now perceived evidence that Vox, too, had had fallen victim to and had his brain eaten by the undead Führer, leading to his comparing feminists to Nazis and calling the comparison an "insult to Nazis everywhere." But there was a twist. Vox seemed to be making excuses for the Nazis, saying:

The primary victims of NASDAP ideology were the Jews, a group that the NASDAP intellectuals sincerely believed were secretly dominating the world. Thus, they waged a heroic - albeit insane - twilight struggle in a futile attempt at world revolution to free the German race from what they viewed as its economic oppression. They did so in the awareness that if they failed, their nation would likely be destroyed. They killed approximately six million Jews, most of whom were adults perfectly capable of defending themselves.

Even Orac, who normally cared little for the affairs of humans and was interested in finding the Hitler Zombie more as an intellectual exercise to understand how historical analogies could be twisted beyond recognition and how a sense of proportion could be utterly lost than because of the horror that it caused, couldn't help but be repulsed by such "reasoning" that equated a struggle to attain equal rights with the activities of a bloodthirsty tyrant and the genocidal regime that he spawned. Vox seemed to be making excuses for the Nazis on the basis that they sincerely believed the Jews were undermining Germany and that most of the Jews the Nazis murdered were adults who apparently in his mind could have defended themselves. (Had he never heard of the bravely suicidal Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 and what the result was?) But that wasn't all:

The NASDAP leadership directly confronted the militaries of three major world powers, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States of America, in an attempt to establish totalitarian rule.

He definitely seems to admire the Nazis, thought Orac. Look at the way he points out how they "directly confronted" the Soviet Union, U.S., and Great Britain. So how could he claim that feminists are worse than the Nazis? According to Vox:

The primary victims of feminist ideology are unborn children, a group that the feminist leadership sincerely believes handicaps women's ability to obtain college degrees. Thus, they have waged a purely political battle in a futile attempt at ideological revolution to free the female gender from what they viewed as its biological oppression. They did so in the awareness that if they failed, women would be condemned to live hellish lives as wives and mothers. They have killed approximately 50 million children, all of whom were completely unable to defend themselves.

Vox's conclusion?

Any rational human being would harbor more respect for a Nazi than for a feminist. But then, neither Nazism nor feminism is designed to appeal to those handicapped with the ability to think rationally.

It is obvious that Vox isn't handicapped with any such ability to think rationally, thought Orac, and that is almost certainly why the creature continued to hunger after having snacked on his brain and likely hungers still. Orac could not help but conclude that Vox's MENSA membership clearly does not necessarily imply reasoning ability.

Given the lack of sustenance provided by such brains as Vox's and Rush Erik's, Orac had no doubt that the creature would attack again. Indeed, it rather puzzled him that the gap between attacks had been so long.

No longer able to motivate himself to continue to subject his circuits to more such idiocy and fearing that such illogic might corrupt the purity of his cyberneural pathways and Tarial cell, thus jeopardizing the entire galactic network, Orac decided to go back to contemplating the black hole in his sector for. It was far more relaxing and an exercise in pure mathematics and logic. The search for the undead Führer with a taste for human brains would have to wait a while. Besides, Orac's scientists were continuing the search for their own reasons, and he didn't want them to become too dependent on his advice. Otherwise they might interrupt his contemplation of the cosmos (not to mention his analysis of jokes and limericks) far more frequently than he could tolerate. In any case, even Orac's circuits needed to recharge after exposure to such concentrated doses of bad reasoning.

The Hitler Zombie would still be there when Orac was ready to seek him again.

11 example(s) of insolence returned:

Oh, my God, Orac! I hadn't come across Vox before but what a scary guy. All I can think is that the Zombie must had a bad case of indigestion if he ate that brain. (By the way....if I post comments on Vox's site and he calls me a girl, and I do belong to the female gender, is it still an insult?)

"They killed approximately six million Jews, most of whom were adults perfectly capable of defending themselves."

I thought this quote from Vox was particularly vile: is he seriously intimating that the Jews only have themselves to blame for the Holocaust because they should have tried harder to defended themselves?

Orac: There's a famous Rugby player of the name Erik Rush, famous not least for the ferocious headbashing he's given & received - possibly this is the same guy, post-brain damage?

As for Vox Day, I've never encountered anyone so vile (and if you want a truly squalid and ghastly time, get hold of one of his so-called Christian SF books through the library - for gods sake dont give him any of your money - and try to read it. If you can make 50 pages before hurling it through a window, you've got a stronger stomach than I.

Went over to the Vox Day's site and he is complaining about you, though it doesn't appear he believes in the courtesy of linking to you so people can see the post for themselves, or so that you can find out about it. I guess he doesn't want to get trounced again.

"is he seriously intimating that the Jews only have themselves to blame for the Holocaust because they should have tried harder to defended themselves?"

Since he believes Jews bring "understandable" anti-semitism on themselves because a few Jews complain about Christmas decorations, yeah, I think he believes that.

"if I post comments on Vox's site and he calls me a girl, and I do belong to the female gender, is it still an insult"

Well, you're just inferior by nature (and a fascist), so it's really God insulting you, I'm sure. (Of course, that the large majority of support for the at least equally totalitarian Communist party in Germany came from men is not something he'll acknowledge. Hell, he probably doesn't even know.)

And yes, his books suck. I guess that's why he urges his followers to write reviews of them, knowing they'll do their sycophantic best to promote him.

Oh, you've go to love this:"It's also to amusing to note Orac's inability to apply logic, as he cites the bravely suicidal Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto while rejecting my similar characterization of National Socialist Germany (population 80 million) taking on the United Kingdom (48 million), France (41 million), Poland (35 million), the Soviet Union (195 million) and the United States (130 million)."

Because we all know population size is everything. The Jews (where was there independent military again?) vs. Germany is just the same therefore as Germany vs. Allies. (And surely Hitler just knew all those countries were going to get involved; the isolationist U.S. population was just aching to join in before JAPAN bombed us...)

Now that we've learned victory is determined by population size, Israel must have lost its wars with Middle Eastern states, Britain never could have had an empire of any size, the Sunnis in Iraq were never in charge...

What Vox says about me doesn't bother me in the least. In fact, I find his petulant refusal to link to me when he tries to trash me to be quite amusing. It dates back to this post, where, early in the history of my blog, when its traffic was much lower, I sarcastically "thanked" Vox for driving traffic to my site.

Ever since then, on the two or three occasions he's decided to respond when I call him for his wingnuttery, he has assiduously refused to link to me. It's quite amusing in its childish way.